Original Lithography. The Present Revival in England

M. H. Spielmann

In transcribing the Internet Archive version of the following article from the Magazine of Art, I have followed the house style of the Victorian Web and converted titles of books and artworks to italics. Click on images to enlarge them. —George P. Landow

early half a century went by before lithography was
to be regarded in England as an original and spontaneous method for recording
artistic impression. Mr. Whistler began in 1877 in work upon the
stone, and joined his efforts to those of M. Fantin-Latour and
others in Paris to use and awaken interest in lithography for the
sake of its own inherent qualities. His Early Morning appeared in Mr. Theodore Watts's paper, Piccadilly, in 1878, and other drawings such as the Limehouse and Nocturne — exquisite studies in wash gradation — which, though executed in 1877, were only issued nine years later, in portfolio form.

Left: Nocturne and Early Morning by J. M. Whistler. These lithographs do not appear in the original article.

Then came amongst amongst others the Little Model Reading, and afterwards the Brittany and
the Luxembourg series, in all of which the draughtsman's artistic
taste as well as his artistic views are daintily and firmly recorded.
Generally speaking, Mr. Whistler prefers to use the chalk for line work only,
and wash for tint work, reserving the latter, rather than stumping, for the covering of spaces; while the modern dodges have, so far as am aware,
been entirely neglected by him. It should be observed that all Mr. Whistler's earlier work was executed direct upon the stone, the rest for convenience sake upon transfer-paper; and it may be added that he has attempted in a limited sense chromo-lithography by touches of colour here and
there upon the design. Slight though these are they of course have necessitated a separate printing for each colour.

In due time Mr. Way — who, with the Messrs. Hanhart, and Vincent Brooks, Day and Sons, had by his admirable printing rendered artistic lithography possible in this country persuaded a number of artists to
experiment in the method, believing that an acquaintance with
its qualities would not only ensure its adoption but would develop such enthusiasm as would ensure the triumph of the art. Several members of
the Hogarth Club willingly responded, and the results were collectively issued.
Among the chief of these was the admirable figure by Sir James Linton: and Messrs. C. E. Holloway, E. J. Gregory, Charles Green, Buxton Knight,
Thomas Waite, and Edwin Hayes, with a few more, were included in the band.
The work was of course experimental consisting of one-hour sketches; and they
were executed at Mr. Way's own house: but although twenty years have
passed, and though every draughtsman expressed his pleasure in the work and process, none of these artists save Mr. Holloway cared to pursue it. In
1893 a similar effort was made by the Art Workers'
Guild, when Messrs. Frank Short, [W. R.] Lethaby, H. Paget,
A. Mackworth, J. Pennell, and G. McCulloch met to produce twenty-minutes' drawings on the stone. The result was in this case more satisfactory, and
must be counted in the development of the new taste. Then others continued the
experiment; Mr. Robert Macbeth on a large scale,
and Mr. Mortimer Menpes and Mr. Anning Bell more
tentatively. But, for the most part, they have left
the field free for men more constant and appreciative
than themselves; and when considering those who
are really identified with the English school, we
must eliminate the names of those who have merely
coquetted with the art.

Among the earlier men to whom lithography
cane naturally is Professor Herkomer. When the
process was still spurned by those who did not understand it,
or whose judgment had been prejudiced
by the miserable productions of commercial
lithographers uttered and passed into currency for the
most, part from abroad — he produced many plates of
Bavarian life, of which a few have been made known
to the greater public as subjects of several of the
most dramatic pictures of his earlier period. For
minor purposes too, he made use alike of stone and
transfer paper, employing brush, stump, chalk, and
pen although, even in these later days, he has
produced a series of plates for his "Violin Pieces,"
and has shown power and delicacy, and a sympathetic
and dainty touch in these drawings upon the stone, he is one of the few, notwithstanding, who is not enamoured of the process. "However artistic," he
tells me, "however well done, there remains the cheap
work." Not necessarily, I think: as the exquisite
results produced by many men have proved — results
which not only could not have been better obtained,
but could not have been obtained at all, by any
other method.

The most prominent of the younger school of
lithographers is unquestionably Mr. Charles Shannon.
Since 1889 he has with admirable persistence produced some two score lithographs, all, with scarce an exception, drawn direct upon the stone, and printed with his own hand and press. The charm of his
work is distinctly that proper to lithography itself,
with an added daintiness and delicacy of the artist's
own temperament. He can, as the French say, "make
the stone sing." His work is not without faults,
though tenderness is its chief note; his compositions
are sometimes detracted from through the proportions, occasionally
peccable, of his figures. But with such drawings as his portrait of
Mr. Van Wisselingh his Linen Bleachers, The Sisters, and Sea and Breeze, he will always be remembered for the exquisite and perfect quality of his work. The
public, moreover, are beginning to find this out. I
am informed that in 1891 the artist issued eight
portfolios of his lithographs; of these not one was
sold. But when a year later their merit was suddenly
discovered, they were bought up within the space of
two months. That the purchasers were for the
most part artists does not matter; or perhaps,
indeed, it matters very much, for it shows a professional appreciation of line workmanship, as in the
plates already mentioned: or of fine design, as in
the Ministrants.

Mr. T. R. Way himself has contributed not a
little to the success of his art, less in the direction of
portraiture than in his townscapes drawn with pencil,
stump, or brush. Sea-gulls at Charing Cross
is not less interesting as an example of tint work than
of the rare event it records, and his Disappearing
London, of which Hack Court, St. Bartholomew'sis an interesting specimen, shows him in the
artistic character peculiarly his own — that of the
classicist. In conjunction with him Mr. C. E.
Holloway has worked. This draughtsman's contributions to the
Ten Auto-lithographs of the Lower Thames,
drawn direct on the stone, for the most
part in pure chalk, are achievements not perhaps
the equals of those of M. Storm van Gravesande —
especially in freedom; but they might well be
studied in comparison with them.

Like Mr. Shannon, Mr. George Thomson is a
lithographer inspired with sufficient enthusiasm to
have a press of his own and to take his own impressions.
Delicacy and daintiness of touch are his, whether in head or
figure drawing, or in representation of riverside landscape
or Thames township. In the Strand on the Green or in Under Kew Bridge, texture of grain, silveriness of quality, and precision of touch are alike charming; and in his
Brentford Eyot he renders for us an
atmospheric effect with a success more often sought by
lithographers than obtained.

The spirit of French lithography pervades the
work of Mr. Will Rothenstein, whose work, essentially
unacademic, successfully aims at being artistic in feeling and amusant in design. His Millamant is a skilful rendering of a seventeenth-century lady with powdered hair and his portraits of
Sir Henry Acland, Mr. Robinson Ellis, Viscount St. Cyres, and otherOxford scholars and athletes, as well as those of De Goncourt and Zola, show
a power of rendering apart from the artist's appreciation of the stone.
Mr. Raven-Hill, like Mr. Phil May, on the othe hand, prefer to use the surface of the transfer paper as though it were a surface for ordinary drawing purposes:
and the former, with the studies of his infant daughter, and the latter with
We're a rare old, fair old, ricketty, racketty crew,
present us with lithographs which to all intents and
purposes arc chalk drawings of well calculated, masterly touch —
artists' sketches thrown rapidly hut with unerring effect upon the stone. Again, the portrait of Mr. Le Gallienne by Mr. Wilson Steer reveals the hand that may achieve sensitive and notable work in the process here used with some
indecision.

The latest movement in lithography — an original
movement, too — belongs exclusively to England. If
the adherents of older classic method show some
tendency to scoff at innovations of the more modern
school as nouveau jeu, not for a moment to be tolerated or acknowledged, they combine at least in protesting against, or at least in criticising with some hostility, this heterodox departure, introduced by Mr.
Goulding, the celebrated printer of etchings.

This craftsman, hardly less an artist than those
to whose work's he ministers, has not lone since combined with his
brother, Mr. Charles Goulding, to introduce a new method of
printing lithographs which shall do for the lithographic stone or transfer-paper, when it leaves the artist's hand, what he does for the
etcher's copper-plate. That is to say, by stumping
and manipulation to smooth down in the proof what
was left bald upon the stone — to impart the tone and
quality demanded by the artist: to humour and, in
short, interpret. To those who applaud lithography
as an absolutely autographic method, Mr. Goulding's innovation must appear to some degree revolutionary: but judged by results, the impressions
when they leave his hands have qualities and beauties
which we might look for in vain elsewhere. The process, indeed, enables even a beginner in lithography,
through his printer's assistance, to produce work in
which lack of experience is little evident, and for
which effects, painter-like and pleasing, need not be
wanting. What the result of experience on the part
of both artist and printer cannot yet be foretold.

Mr. Goulding has gone further. In the first
place he has invented a new transfer-paper which
possesses a surface free from the ordinary mechanical
grain hitherto identified with lithography.
Whether or not this is an improvement as the new
adherents declare, or a sacrilegious innovation robbing
the stone of its characteristic
quality, as may be maintained by the rival school, I need not stop
to discuss. Furthermore, Mr. Goulding obtains extraordinary painterlike effects by a first printing of a tint upon the paper, gradating it with the utmost
care and feeling in relation to the subject to be
super-printed upon it in black or coloured ink — all
the while avoiding the unsympathetic flat tints of
the school of Haghe and Harding, in which the
colours were cold and conventionally used, and the
lights cut out with sudden and often with jarring effect
— generally artificial and wholly out of tone. Not a
few of our leading artists have tried the method :
and to many of them it has so strongly appealed,
that in the near future we may assuredly look
forward to the execution by them of numerous
works of the highest charm and of great artistic
importance.

Among the first to try it was Lord Leighton, who,
as late as August 14th. 1895, wrote to me: “I have
just lithographed for the forthcoming Centenaire de
la Lithographie to be held in Paris, a small female
head, in order to show my interest in and to help the
British section. It is the first time that I have
touched lithographic chalk and paper.” About the
same time, Mr. Watts executed his beautiful Study
of a Boy's Head and followed it up with a similar
work which, whether Mr. Goulding's method be
heterodox or not, will certainly be remembered as
among the most charming were printed from
the stone. I may here remark that between these
works and Mr. Watts's previous essay with lithography,
more than sixty years had elapsed; for as a boy, he privately
practised his hand and youthful attempts at composition
by designing illustrations on a stone of his own to
one of the romances
of Sir Walter Scott.

Tiger by Herbert Dicksee.

So, bitten by Mr. Goulding's mezzotint-ground transfer-paper
and tempted by his delightful printing, many of our most
reputable artists have produced plates, the beauty and charm of which are
indisputable. Those who form the list include
Messrs. Frank Dicksee, Frank Short, J. W. North.
Oliver Hall, A. Hartley, Herbert Dicksee, P. Strang,
C. J. Watson, with Sir James Linton, Mr. Alma-Tadema, Mr.
E. A. Abbey, Mr. Herbert Marshall
Mr. Corbet, Mr. Sargent, Mr. Alfred Parsons, Mr.
Goscombe John, and Mr. Foottit. In the works of
some of these, inexperience and tentativeness are
manifest enough to place them in a lower rank than
the rest. But taken as a whole, the collection of
them, together with the more recent masterly work
of Mr. George Clausen and the dainty fancies of Mr.
Sainton, is to be regarded as an interesting supple
ment to the works of artists abroad and a very valuable
achievement in the field of English art.

So valuable, so beautiful, and so interesting, indeed,
are the results of the new movement, that it is
not to be believed that the productions to which I
have referred in these articles on the Revival of
Original Lithography will leave the public cold. The
merits of the art are not less, in their way, than
those of etching; to the vast mass of etchings which
for the last score of years have found their way upon
the walls and into the portfolios of art-lovers and
collectors, it is vastly superior. The public need but
assure itself of the truth of this to come to look with
unprejudiced and appreciative eye upon these works
of the British and foreign schools, and to learn that
taste and knowledge both require that they should
support the new manifestation in the future as they
supported etching and mezzotint in the past. They
need but satisfy themselves that it has nought in
common with the machine-printed work that helped
so greatly to discredit the older lithography, to see in
it the freshest expression of the artist's power — to
feel in it the thrill of the painter's emotion — to hear
in it the most candid and the sincerest tones of
the master's voice.

Related Material

Bibliography

Spielmann, M. H. “Original Lithography. The Present Revival in England.” Magazine of Art. 20 (December 1896-November 1897): 289-96. Internet Archive version of a copy in the University of Toronto Library. Web. 5 November 2014.